Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a solid-state image pickup element and an image pickup apparatus.
Description of the Related Art
In recent years, there have been proposed a digital still camera, a digital video camera, and the like, which are capable of acquiring an image having a wide dynamic range. For example, in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. S63-306777, there is described a technology in which an image having an appropriate brightness is segmented from a plurality of images with different exposure amounts, and those sectioned images are combined to generate an image having a wide dynamic range. The thus-generated image having the wide dynamic range is referred to as a high dynamic range (HDR) image. However, in the related art, there have been cases where the HDR image cannot always be acquired at high speed.